Intergenerational downward mobility and radical voting

Sociological literature highlights that downward intergenerational mobility is becoming an increasingly common experience in virtually all European countries (Bukodi and Goldthorpe 2018; Bukodi, Paskov, and Nolan 2020). This matter of fact has encouraged scholars to consider how the end of widespread social ascent has been changing politics (Jackson and Grusky 2018). In this regard, research suggests that downward mobility depresses external efficacy and – consequently – favours radical voting (Daenekindt, van der Waal, and de Koster 2018; Kurer and van Staalduinen 2020; Mayer 2002; Mitrea, Mühlböck, and Warmuth 2020; Peugny 2006). Nonetheless, extant scholarly knowledge may be questionable, as it mainly relies on standard OLS regression, which is unsuitable to study mobility effects holding both class origin and destination constant in order to avoid endogeneity bias (Duncan 1966; Sobel 1981, 1985). Furthermore, such knowledge is not fully informative, as it is unclear under which conditions downward mobility spurs either radical left or radical right voting. This issue is critical, since distinct political beliefs motivate each of these two electoral choices (Rooduijn et al. 2017). Hence, the present study aims to clarify the relation between intergenerational mobility and radical voting. For this purpose, it tackles the said two problems by advancing a theoretical and methodological contribution. First, we contend that the above theoretical inconsistency arises because extant studies assume that voters radicalize in a random direction. Contrarily, we hypothesize that downward mobility radicalizes voters while keeping them on the same side of the left-right spectrum. Although we agree with previous research that downward mobility should reasonably spur grievances against mainstream politics, we also acknowledge that left-right orientation is shaped by deeply rooted values and these tend to be stable over time. Studying whether radicalisation is coupled with changes in left-right placement implies testing downwardly mobile voters’ choice against some benchmark. Because a straightforward counterfactual is unobservable, we test voters’ political orientation against their parents’ one. We decompose parents-offspring congruence in two dimensions: radicalism and left-right orientation. We expect downwardly mobile voters to adopt more radical stances than their parents while not being less congruent in their support for either the left or the right. Additionally, we advance a methodological contribution by applying cutting-edge methods from social mobility and cognate literature (Fosse and Pfeffer 2021; Fosse and Winship 2019; Luo and Hodges 2020) yielding more reliable effect estimates. We carry out these analyses using data from the European Social Survey (ESS) as well as national-level longitudinal surveys. Preliminary analysis on ESS data using – as is conventional – diagonal reference model (DRM) (Sobel 1981, 1985) does not provide evidence for a relation between mobility and radical voting, but because DRM is allegedly prone to attenuation bias (Fosse and Pfeffer 2021) further investigation is needed. Downward mobility “changes the individual, leaving scars in the form of unfulfilled expectations and lurking fears” (Newman 1988, 85). As we observe a gradual deterioration of economic prospects for a growing segment of the population, clarifying the political consequences of this social phenomenon is of the utmost importance.